On the Internet, a huge number of notes on the topic of remote work, with a concise overview of the pros and cons and well-known tips on how to get yourself out of the routine. With the increasing number of remote employees, I decided to study the issue deeper: I read blogs about remote work and tried different ideas. Here I will share my experience, methods of preserving and increasing motivation.
Before starting work on the article, I conducted a survey among my colleagues on problems in remote work, asked recipes for motivation and self-organization. I shared the results below.
The survey showed that only one employee wrote “everything is fine and there are no problems at all”, almost 40% – replied “nothing needs to be changed, even teambuilding is not necessary”, 57% – would go to the office for a couple of days, 18% – would like to go to the office for a full week, 30% said that they lacked motivation to start work and tasks. The results are contradictory – there are problems, not everyone is ready to solve them.
The result of the polls depends on how many employees consciously chose this way of work. 24% of the interrogated said that there are no other suggestions in their region. It means that there is no choice and you need to adjust, perhaps, to not very comfortable variant of work.
How to start your day? Let’s see how different employees spend their mornings:
2020 is the “growth boom” of remote offices, which gave rise to a large number of new time and task management tools for distributed teams. But https://basepointpsychiatry.com/tms-treatment/ proves that they do not solve the problems of motivation, work schedule, depression and lack of verbal communication.
Correlating the answers, the most obvious problem is “to start work”, the next one is “lack of verbal communication”. Nothing original, but this is what most home office employees around the world are struggling with.
For the basis of the information below, I took the practices of IT companies with extensive experience in distributed team organizations, quotes, tips from “desktop books” and analysis of the most popular blogs about remote work.
Stages
Divide the working day into 2 large working stages. Ideally for 4 hours and changing the location if possible.
Night
If you feel comfortable working late in the evening – do not break yourself. But it should be only a part of your work (not more than half), and colleagues should know your schedule. 5 hours during the day for tasks that require communication and 3 hours in the evening – a good schedule if you have a timer.
Start and finish
Set the start time and end time of the work stage. In the office, time is felt differently. You can better manage your tasks and control the balance between work and personal life. If you understand that you have one hour left and two tasks left, it’s not so easy to get distracted.
I am always online
Do not pretend to be online if you left your workplace. The speed of response to requests is much more important than the feeling of being there. Team members are worse off if they do not respond online than if they do not respond to a non-standard schedule of your work. According to the survey among 5000 remote employees (USA) – status “went for a walk with the dog,” “went to lunch” is perceived as positive, colleagues are ready to wait for an answer, and “active work” without an answer is perceived as ignoring.
10 minutes every hour
Spend every hour up to 10 minutes on your business. In the office everyone is distracted, chatting, drinking coffee. A short break every hour, for example, to call on business, order food, put laundry, pour coffee, walk the dog, talk to the child – it is necessary to unload the brain, otherwise the slowdown will follow. To adjust the time, the timer settings on your smartphone will be suitable.
